Boyfriend Material

Alexis Hall's Boyfriend Material, published in 2020, centres on Luc O'Donnell, who is tangentially and reluctantly famous. He is the only child of two rock stars who split when he was young, and he has never met his father, who spent the following twenty years moving in and out of rehabilitation. Now that his father is making a comeback, Luc finds himself in the papers again, and a single compromising photograph is enough to make him a problem for the charity he works for.

The solution his colleagues settle on is a respectable relationship, so Luc sets out to find a nice, normal boyfriend. Oliver Blackwood is a barrister and an ethical vegetarian who has never inspired a moment of scandal, and on paper he is exactly what Luc needs; the difficulty is that apart from the fact that they are both gay, the two men have very little in common. The arrangement they agree to has an end date attached to it, a wedding to get through in the meantime, and two entirely different sets of friends who have to be kept reasonably content. Hall has said that the novel takes its cue from the romantic comedies of Richard Curtis from the 1990s and early 2000s, naming among them Four Weddings and a Funeral, Notting Hill and Love Actually.

Boyfriend Material is a contemporary queer romantic comedy set between London and the working lives of its two leads, and it is told in Luc's first-person voice.